Some systems allow for cellular communications, e.g., Wide Area Network communications, between devices via a base station or direct peer to peer communications without the communications being routed through the base station. The cellular and peer to peer communications may use the same frequency resources. Direct peer-to-peer communication without going through base station may be established to reduce the load on a base station. While allowing devices operating in a peer to peer mode to independently determine and control resource utilization for peer to peer communications reduces the processing and management burden on a base station sharing frequency resources with the devices operating in peer to peer mode, failure for a base station to exert control of frequency and/or other resource utilization has the potential to create interference problems in a cellular system.
Some or all of the frequency resources used for peer to peer communications may correspond to frequency resources used by a base station in a cell or a neighboring cell in which a wireless terminal performing peer to peer communications is located. Thus, peer to peer communications may create interference to neighboring cells and/or to cellular communication within a cell.
In order to reduce the effect of interference on one or more base stations it would be desirable if a base station could influence or control communications resources used by particular peer to peer communications links or sets of peer to peer communications links and/or the rate or frequency of resource utilization without placing an excessive management or processing burden on a base station.